trying on a metaphor
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@autistish
listen, Iâm not the biggest fan of kids but if a child looks at me then you bet Iâm gonna smile back at them. kids deserve to experience the world as a kind and safe place to explore okay.
But the world is not kind or safe.
then Fucking do your part to make it that way.
If youâre an adult, do the stuff you couldnât as a kid.
Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost ÂŁ3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had ÂŁ3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad werenât there to say no.
I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went âAww man, Iâd love a McFlurry.â And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.
I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking âMan, Iâd love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.â It took me a few minutes to go âWait, I can hire one of those bikes!â
I guess what Iâm saying is, those impulsive things you wanted to do as a kid - see the dinosaur exhibit, play in the fountains with the other kids, lie in the shade for 2 hours - you can do when youâre an adult. You have to deal with a whole lot of other bull, but at least you can indulge your inner 8 year-old.
this is the purest-realist shit ever
one of the coworkers I assumed didn't like me - which made all those outings a bit uncomfortable - took me aside last night, put her hand sort of on my shoulder, looked me intensely in the eyes and said:
"just so you know, I do like you. I just have autism."
also, one of the guys was getting very comfortable - too comfortable for most people - and he kept resting his arm over the back of my chair, and so at some point when I turned to her to ask about something mundane she interrupted me:
"I see his arm on your chair," very intense eye contact, which I understand was specifically for my benefit "if it makes you uncomfortable let me know and I will tell him off. I literally don't care what he thinks and it will be easier for me than you because I'm incapable of feeling awkward."
the front seat of the car is a type of confessional
i genuinely think that physically itâs easier to have hard conversations when youâre both facing forward, not having to look at each other. the catholic church knew this also
The adhd modes of food
1. You ate that burger so fast. You ate that burger so fucking fast and now the whole Red Robin is staring at you god what the fuck
2. You started eating like a normal person, but then you started talking or daydreaming and now the waitress is handing you the check but youâve still got half a plate of cold fettuccine
3. You were going to go out to eat, but then you saw a video in your YouTube recommendation that drew you towards it like moth to a flame, and now itâs 10 pm and youâve got an empty bag of tortilla chips in your hand and shame in your heart
4. Mac And Cheese
5. You got engrossed in a project, suddenly you feel like youâre going to die, or faint, or both? Oh. youâre hungry.
6. Youâre hungry. But every food you can think of sounds disgusting. Time for your 15th day of lunchables for breakfast in a row.
7. The food youâve been obsessively eating for the past 2 weeks and you relied on is now the grossest thing you could put in your mouth
a lot of life can be persevered thru by secretly playing pretend in your mind the whole time
While I'm talking about social stuff I had to learn as an autistic person
There's a LOT of social interactions between human beings whose purpose really boils down to being like that thing dogs do where they go "omg YOU'RE a dog??? I'M a dog!!!!!" And that's not a bad thing. Highly ritualized "meaningless" displays of human connection like friendly greetings and talking about things like weather actually do serve a purpose which is like idk ritualized displays birds do. YOU'RE a human? Omg I'M a human!!!! Wow!!!
And they don't have to be your favorite flavor of interaction. You can even think they're silly. But they DO serve a purpose or else they wouldn't be a thing.
There's lots of good and folksy responses to "how are you doing" that don't involve either lying or undermining the ritualized purpose of the greeting exchange, too. My great grandmother Ethel for example was a big fan of "well, I'm a-doin'"
"Things like 'How are you?' and 'Have a nice day' and 'What do you think of the weather, then?' What these sounds mean is: I am alive and so are you."
- Wings, by Terry Pratchett.
It sounds so cute when you put it this way
When I was a teenager I really hated and gamified smalltalk, but... Then I got cockatiels. And cockatiels have a thing called "contact calls". Basically, it's a particular set of noises they make to know where each other are without looking at them directly. There's variations, when the flock member is close it's a very sweet little sound, when they don't know where you are this can progress to a panicked shriek.
I kind of loved mimicking it. It let me interact with my birds in a whole new way that meant a lot to them, and it turned out to be incredibly helpful when my (completely unrecall trained, fully flighted bird) got startled in a bad gust of wind on the way between aviary and house and ended up circling in the bad weather, totally disoriented... And calling for us. It let her figure out how to get back down to come home.
Gradually I realised that lots of animals do this, actually. Cat activation noise is a contact call. Dogs do it in some kinds of whines. Social birds have big repertoires of them. It's just a ritual to keep in contact.
Then... I realised that's what a lot of those small rituals of smalltalk actually are. They are the act of petting an anxious or excited dog to soothe it, or letting each other know you're still in the room together. Humans have a huge variety in the way they use these, but I stopped finding a lot of them so annoying when I realised what the rituals were actually for.
I mean, I still prefer to use the non-word versions among friends and other people amenable to it, but. I find it, given in good faith, kind of endearing now.
do you ever sabotage your own free time? like wtf is that about? i want to play this game or read or do something specific but instead i will just stare out the window or scroll mindlessly???
New Neuroqueer Flags!
So I'm not the biggest fan of the current neuroqueer flags circling around, and so i decided to do my take it on it by incorpertaing the colour scheme of the Queer flag. This version more colourful than versions using the genderqueer flag, and I just associate neurodiversity with lots of colours...
Full colour Neuroqueer flag
Pastel Neuroqueer flag
Low contrast (for sensory sensitivities) Neuroqueer flag
Made for me, by me, but feel free to use with credit!
Have I told yâall about my husbandâs Fork Theory? If I did already, pretend I didnât, Iâm an old.
So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. Itâs super useful and we use that all the time. But it has a corollary. You know the phrase, âStick a fork in me, Iâm done,â right? Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens. A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one âyou poked my trigger on purpose because you think itâs fun to see me melt downâ pitchfork.
This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as âIt may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.â
I like this and also I like the low key point that you may be able to cope with bigger forks by finding little ones you can remove quickly. A combination of time, focus, and reduction to small stressors that can allow you to focus on the larger stressor in a constructive way.
!!!
I really do think that itâs good for the soul to be unironically pretentious about something. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way but in a âyes, it really is that deep and I would love to enthusiastically and passionately explain whyâ kind of way.
Me, shoving my earbuds in all the way to my brain: this will fix me
People keep posting about how bad they feel in December and Iâm sure for many people in the northern hemisphere that IS a wintertime thing, sure enough, but
Have you considered?
December is also Big Routine Disrupt Time.
Everyone wants a piece of you in December. Public holidays. Family events. SOMEONE is bound to be drunk. You have to travel. Your workplace either goes into overdrive or becomes a ghost town. You have a list of obligations as long as your arm all happening at once.
Your routine is being disrupted by outside forces and it wonât slow down until. Like. Mid January at best. đ
genuinely delighted to see so many other people hate this time of year for SO many reasons
compare to October, which is comfortably business as usual except for everything smells great and spooky shit goes on sale everywhere, then it ends with the sexy goth candy weekend.
December wishes she had Octoberâs immaculate goddamn energy.
One of the many stupid feelings humans are capable of having is the private, repulsive rage of seeing someone getting support and sympathy for a problem no one helped you with when you were having it, either because you didnât have anyone or because it never occurred to you that you could ask for help. Suddenly the world seems to split into two â the realm that contains people like them, the connected and loved â and the realm that contains you, the miserable and the alone, who must suffer in solitude. This is sufficiently horrible that you grasp for reasons or world-understandings to make this reality acceptable, and a mentally available one is that it is superior to be in the miserable solitude realm, that the problem is one that should be solved with self sufficiency and dignity. That this other person is pathetic for being aided and loved when you were not. Scorn is more palatable than confronting the notion that you could have received aid (if you had made different choices or been luckier), that you desperately wish you could have been aided but were not. Scorn is more palatable than the howling hunger for things to have been different for you. So your mind chooses scorn.
It is also a bad place to be. Human existence is full of such traps.
God, I can't tell you how much the "there's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "Your head gets screwey when you're apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit? The tiger? I've gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.
i simply need everyone to understand that i am tired all of the time. literally at all moments. if i ever go somewhere and do something, it is not because i am somehow full of energy, but instead that i have carefully stored up all of my little bits of energy like a dragon collecting jewels, and am now vaporizing them all at once
